First Life in the Universe

TL;DR

This paper explores the earliest possible time for life to have appeared in the universe, suggesting it could have emerged much earlier than traditionally thought, potentially within the first 0.1 billion years after the Big Bang.

Contribution

It proposes a hypothesis that life could have originated at redshifts greater than 45, earlier than the commonly assumed epoch around redshift 6, based on cosmic element formation.

Findings

Life could have appeared when the universe was less than 0.1 billion years old.

Heavy element production from hypernovae at high redshifts supports early life emergence.

Discovery of galaxies at z > 9 may support the hypothesis of earlier life origins.

Abstract

Here, we ask a simple question, i.e. "at what cosmic time, at the earliest, did life first appear in the universe?" Given what we know about the universe today, there may be some partial answers to this question, but much will still have to be left to speculation. If life in general requires stars as its primary energy source and uses elemental building blocks heavier than those initially produced in a Big Bang scenario, first life could have appeared, when the universe was considerably less than 0.1 billion years old. At that time, heavy element producing hypernovae exploded at corresponding redshifts.} $z$\,\gapprox\,45, significantly higher than commonly assumed ($z \approx 6$). The recent discovery of a galaxy at $z > 9$ could provide supporting evidence for the hypothesis of a very much shorter time scale than what is widely believed.